Landing pages and SEO - marketo vs. our website

Question

Hi,

I'm under pressure to stop using Marketo landing pages and transition landing pages back to our website (with a Marketo form embedded) so that our website gets the SEO boost from our landing page promotions.

Has anyone had to do that and do you have ideas/considerations on that?

I know that if we go back to landing pages built in our website, we won't have prepopulated forms for return visitors. Anything else we'd lose by doing that?

Thanks!

Josh_Hill13 · Accepted Answer

Laura,If you use Forms 2.0 embed code, you can get pre-fill now.Generally I don't like putting Marketo LPs on the main site unless you are ensuring the data flows properly and you can still use the Form Fill out trigger. You may ask them to use the API to create nicer forms if you want.I'd question the reasoning to use LPs as an SEO boost for your main domain because you are likely using the LPs as part of your direct response mechanisms, not to have floating out there for random people to sign up. Yes, that's great if your page had good SEO, but you are driving specific traffic to these pages.So yes, you could put all of your pages as yourdomain.com/page.html and your main domain will get more juice, but only if the SEO and inbound links are good for that page.

Eddie_Morales · Answer

I'd have to agree with Josh in that generally speaking I don't like to have LPs for direct response/lead generation crawled by search bots. The primary reason for this is that if you were to do a ton of A/B testing to optimize for conversion chances are that the content on these pages will over lap (H1, Body, Title Tags, Meta description) and there's the potential of creating duplicate content pages.

Depending on what type of business you're in, if you're running hundreds or thousands of these tests over time, for example, chances are you'll get penalized by Google's Panda update that came out years ago. It essentially penalizes domains with duplicate content that is perceived to be an effort in "gaming" the system.

Landing pages designed for lead generation should not be crawled by bots. You should push back on your organization and have them focus on creating content on the domain that maps to the buyer's journey and helps them answer questions they're looking for. Becoming a thought leader with exceptional content that builds trust and engages users might be a better way of looking at it.

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